I kind of get the point of Stich Bitch, but not entirely.

After reading “Stich Bitch,” I am left somewhat confused as to what the author’s point was for writing the piece.  The title had me expecting the article to “bitch” about something, to complain.  And in parts, she sounded like she was complaining, only to take it back later.  From the parts I could understand better, it seems that she is simply telling writers and other artists not to be scared of the Internet, but to embrace it for its limitless opportunities.  Whereas a book has a finite amount of space in which it can tell its story or speak its teaching, hypertext has virtually no boundaries.  You can link from it.  You can add to it forever.  You can add graphics.  You can apply visual tricks that entice the reader to keep going almost as much as a story itself entices him/her.  Similar to the article, “Toward an Aesthetics of Transition,” the message also comes across that it is the content that will always be important.  We can keep coming up with different ways to tell stories; but the story-tellers still have a place.

I really didn’t understand the metaphor of the human body used throughout.  I couldn’t always follow how the author was trying to connect those ideas to that of writing hypertext.  There were parts where I wasn’t sure if I was grasping what the author really wanted to say.

That being said, there were some cool quotes that I enjoyed as a fellow writer.  “Sentences always say more than they mean, so writers always write more than they know…”  This is especially true in hypertext.  Pretty much every writer ever has been misinterpreted by some scholar or another.  The Internet, being so broad and often unattributable, makes this problem bigger.  At least in a book, you have the context of the rest of the book and what you know about the writer’s writing style to put a quote into context.  But if you read something on the Internet, oftentimes it is less personal than a book and you have a much smaller selection of reading from the author from which to draw some kind of context of the quote.

“Hypertext fiction thuse begins to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe.”  Hypertext has become one of the most persuasive and soap-boxish (if I can make up a word there) forms of writing there is.  With the Internet, people can not only write about things they are passionate about.  They can also create polls and online campaigns for these things.  This kind of work has revived seemingly dead TV shows, movie franchises, and other forms of media.  This can work against people, too, as some often post rants immediately after a horrible event and wish they could take their words back later.  But alas, what you post on the Internet for five minutes, even if you take it down after, can be spread throughout the whole world.  Books can still be proofread over and over until they are released, to be sure the content is what the author wants it to be.  The Internet is less forgiving.